Reimaging Religion After Obsolescence

 

Retreat & Resurgence

Gerardo Martí

May 27, 2025

There was a time when holding a BlackBerry felt like holding the future. Surgically precise thumb-typing, emails firing off at the speed of thought, the blinking red light—a heartbeat of connectivity—appealed to eager adopters of cutting-edge technology. Its reach exceeded 20 million users by around 2010. And then it was gone.

The BlackBerry didn’t disappear because it was inferior. It disappeared because what we wanted from technology changed. As societal structures evolve, so do our tools, reflecting new desires and demands. German sociologist Hartmut Rosa describes obsolescence as a byproduct of social acceleration. In a world ruled by speed, novelty, and optimization, institutions—even worldviews—lose their resonance not because they stop working, but because they no longer compete. What becomes obsolete is not what is old, but what no longer speaks to present experience.

The importance of relevance was strikingly evident in the abrupt collapse of Robert H. Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral, a juggernaut of twentieth-century American Christianity. Completed in 1980, the glass-enclosed megastructure was a spectacle of modern faith. Its televised services broadcast an optimistic, therapeutic theology, packaged in bold, entrepreneurial charisma. Built to last centuries, the ministry went bankrupt by 2010—not because Christian belief vanished, but because the mode of faith Schuller embodied, and the methods he employed to sustain it, could no longer keep pace with a culture that was both ethnically diversifying and digitally experimenting.

The fall of Schuller’s megaministry made visible a sobering truth: religion itself is vulnerable to obsolescence. The Crystal Cathedral tethered itself to the logics—media saturation, donor generosity, celebrity spectacle—that eventually unmoored it. Schuller’s ministry did not collapse under scandal or dogma, but under a cultural tempo that outran its message and medium. In a society of accelerated obsolescence, even the sacred can fall silent, sealed behind glass walls no one stops to look through anymore.

In Why Religion Went Obsolete, Christian Smith delivers a sociological account of declining religious involvement in the United States. Smith explicitly rejects “theological idealism”—the tendency of church leaders to explain religious vitality through the truth or virtue of their religious doctrines. Instead, he seeks to identify the social mechanisms of religious disaffiliation using expansive qualitative and quantitative data: national surveys, archival materials, and more than two hundred interviews, many drawn from individuals with low or declining religiosity.

Smith reframes religious decline not as a collapse of belief but as the steady erosion of institutional relevance. Religious obsolescence, in his view, is not a dramatic rupture, but an incremental disengagement; not a mere theological rejection, but a broader institutional dissolution.

At the heart of his analysis is a progressive generational drift: religious affiliation has declined across successive cohorts throughout the twentieth century, with a marked acceleration since the 1990s. Smith dismisses standard explanations—liberal theology, low birth rates, poor pastoral leadership—as insufficient. He gives more weight to a theory advanced by Jay Demerath in 1995: that the core values of mainline Protestantism (individualism, pluralism, moral autonomy) were so thoroughly absorbed by American culture that the institutions promoting them became redundant.

In this view, mainline decline stems not from failure, but from mainstreamed cultural aspirations. Yet Smith is not satisfied with this narrative alone. He argues that mainline institutions suffered from a lack of strategic imagination. They failed to exhibit the “discernment, energy, and dexterity” required to adapt to new conditions. He does not specify what such adaptation would entail, but implies that cultural resonance depends not only on shared values but institutional agility. On this account, mainline Protestantism did not die for lack of relevance, but for lack of responsiveness. Crucially, it is not an outlier. The forces rendering it obsolete—cultural diffusion, institutional drift, and generational disaffection—reverberate across the broader terrain of traditional religion.

Smith’s fulcrum is the notion of obsolescence—a condition in which institutions lose their functional necessity, not due to internal error, but because surrounding systems evolve. Unlike secularization theory, which posits a dissipation of belief, obsolescence captures a loss of perceived utility. Religion may persist, but its traditional forms no longer answer contemporary cultural needs. This is not extinction, but a shift in status. As social and technological ecosystems change, inherited forms of religious life lose traction; religious practices falter when institutional trust, shared rituals, and moral consensus erode.

Smith argues that the cultural zeitgeist that emerged in the 1990s and 2000s—shaped by expressive individualism, epistemic suspicion, and therapeutic selfhood—stands in deep tension with the structures and disciplines of traditional religious life. In its place, he sees a rise in alternative systems of meaning: spiritual eclecticism, moral self-curation, and secular communal forms. None of these values is compatible with notions of hierarchy, singular truths, and disciplined social commitments he attributes to traditional religion.

Applying obsolescence to religion is a provocative move. By casting obsolescence as displacement rather than failure, Smith reframes decline as a sociological phenomenon rather than a theological one—but in his generalizations, he risks flattening the religious field into an abstract explanatory model. Much is lost in the details.

As the pages turn, the analysis begins to strain. Smith explains the decline of mainline Protestantism as the result of cultural convergence—its values becoming mainstream. But he attributes Catholic decline to cultural dissonance: Vatican II’s reforms, he argues, introduced ambiguity and confusion rather than renewal. Events like the rejection of Humanae vitae are emblematic of lay autonomy superseding ecclesial authority.

Thus, alignment with culture leads to obsolescence; yet misalignment leads to the same. If religious institutions fail by both conforming and resisting, then the explanatory range of obsolescence becomes too broad to be analytically stable.

This invites a more critical interrogation: Is Smith diagnosing a structural transformation or just a general cultural mood? His own definition of traditional American religion is intentionally narrow. He includes groups like Mormons and Seventh-day Adventists as “traditional,” but excludes Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists as outside the American mainstream. Pagan and esoteric traditions are also bracketed out. Such framing restricts the scope of analysis just as the American religious landscape grows more hybrid, immigrant, and post-institutional. All this religious variety is seen as threatening traditional religion rather than accentuating the emergence and diffusion of other forms of religious thought and practice not accepted as “traditional.”

For Catholics in particular, Smith’s diagnosis underscores not just structural but sacramental instability. The weakening of institutional coherence risks unraveling liturgical participation, doctrinal formation, and the communal life of grace. Obsolescence, in this context, touches not just utility but ecclesial identity. Obsolescence therefore speaks to the steady loss of belief and participation in particular forms of religion, raising questions of institutional sustainability and even long-term validity.

 In Smith’s view, liberal Protestantism suffers from ethical flattening and Catholicism from postconciliar fragmentation. But Evangelicalism is treated more ambivalently. Described as confident and outward-facing in the past, Evangelical Christianity has more recently been seen as politically entangled and culturally polarizing. The rise of the Christian right may have energized certain bases, but it also generated backlash and alienation—especially among younger and more moderate believers—hurting participation and affiliation.

Religious pluralism, immigration, and scientific authority also figure in the analysis. While immigration has bolstered some Christian groups, Smith asserts that immigrants’ religious diversity has diluted Christianity’s public centrality. Even more significant, he argues, is the epistemic displacement caused by science, which has come to occupy the space once held by religious explanation and authority.

Yet many of Smith’s core claims rest more on a cumulative scaffolding of assertive commentary and data points than on thorough empirical demonstration. His larger idea, a genealogy of “expressive individualism” traced to Romanticism and 1960s counterculture, loses specificity and, surprisingly, exempts traditional religion from its influence. Certainly individualism has long shaped Evangelical and Catholic practice—from personal conversion narratives to creative decentralizations of clerical authority.

Likewise, Smith’s discussion of neoliberalism similarly underestimates its deeper historical roots. By limiting its cultural impact to post–Cold War deregulation, the narrative neglects the longer ideological reach extending back to mid-century transformations in labor, education, and civic life. By locating neoliberalism’s influence too late, Smith obscures key contributors of religious disintegration tied directly to economic structures and capitalist reshaping of both business industries and everyday experiences.

Smith’s critique of digital culture rightly observes that digital immediacy disrupts attention, authority, and community. But his pseudo-historical contrast between pre-internet contemplative depth and contemporary overstimulation veers toward romanticization. Pre-digital life was not uniformly attentive or sacramental, nor is digital experience devoid of spiritual encounter.

His long list of “millennial core beliefs” is similarly loose in conception. A thirty-four-item typology including “relativist,” “anti-authority,” “entertained,” and “pornographic” feels less analytical than impressionistic. It gestures toward a cultural mood but risks reinforcing caricature over nuance.

Importantly, Smith’s own conclusion—that religious actors bear more blame for decline than secular society—is only briefly asserted and insufficiently explored. The crucial role of scandals, abuses of power, and exclusionary practices that have directly undermined trust, transparency, and community receive little elaboration. They only occur late in the narrative, but are central to the erosion of traditional religious institutions.

Why Religion Went Obsolete is a formidable and provocative contribution to the study of religion today. Smith’s central claim—that traditional religious institutions have been displaced, not destroyed—offers a compelling frame for interpreting the shifting religious terrain of late modernity. But the central concept of obsolescence, while illuminating, occasionally proves too elastic to account for the diversity, resilience, and contradictions of American religious life. The book’s strength lies in its boldness, its readiness to name cultural trends many theologians and pastors intuit but struggle to frame. Its weakness lies in its analytic simplifications and selective historical memory.

It risks missing not the reality of decline, but the complexity of transformation. If obsolescence is the primary diagnosis, the deeper question is whether new forms of faith can emerge. More importantly, perhaps they already exist, though we do not yet recognize them. For the Church—especially in its Catholic expression—the task may not be to mimic cultural acceleration, but to recover the kind of rootedness that can withstand it. It remains to be seen whether the Church has the courage to discern with new eyes what may already exist, to not just lament the past but to celebrate a fresh wind of the Spirit moving in unpredictable directions.

It might be helpful to remember that Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral was sold and refurbished for a different clientele. Since 2019, it has served as a proper cathedral for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange—drawing a different mix of membership and holding Mass for as many as twelve thousand attendees every weekend. Obsolescence of one set of religious practices can pave the way for a striking resurgence of another.

This article was published as part of a symposium titled “The Future of American Religion.” The other contributions can be found here:

Peter Steinfels, “An Alternative Narrative?”

Susan Bigelow Reynolds, “Overlooked Treasure”

Kaya Oakes, “Ask Better Questions”

This symposium was made possible with the support of the Lilly Endowment.

Gerardo Martí is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology at Davidson College and president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. His most recent book, The Church Must Grow or Perish: Robert H. Schuller and the Business of American Christianity, is available from Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

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